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Nouveau Advances NVIDIA NVF0/GK110 Support

07-05-2013, 12:30 AM

Phoronix: Nouveau Advances NVIDIA NVF0/GK110 Support

The open-source reverse-engineered Nouveau driver now has 2D EXA acceleration and X-Video support for NVIDIA's "NVF0" or better known as the GK110 GPU found in the NVIDIA GeForce TITAN and GeForce GTX 780. Updates to the Nouveau DRM and Mesa Gallium3D driver have also arrived...

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There's also RFC-level patches on the mesa-dev list today to add compute support for NVC0 (GeForce 400/500-series)... I'm sure there'll probably be a couple rounds of revisions, but progress is progress.

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The open-source reverse-engineered Nouveau driver now has 2D EXA acceleration and X-Video support for NVIDIA's "NVF0" or better known as the GK110 GPU found in the NVIDIA GeForce TITAN and GeForce GTX 780. Updates to the Nouveau DRM and Mesa Gallium3D driver have also arrived...

Both project will never be in good shape when needed most, compared to binary and EVERYONE and their dog know it.
AMD made clear, they won't care for performance of OSS drivers.
Nvidia doesn't even release documentation.

Anyone who is paranoid enough would have Intel by now.
Why even bother?

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Both project will never be in good shape when needed most, compared to binary and EVERYONE and their dog know it.
AMD made clear, they won't care for performance of OSS drivers.

Anyone who is paranoid enough would have Intel by now.
Why even bother?

AMD do care about performance of their open source drivers. What they said is that they would be happy if their open source drivers gave ~70% of the performance of the closed source drivers. It's not that they don't care, it's that their open source team has limited resources, and above that level of performance the performance increase that results from a fixed time investment decreases significantly.

AMDs open source drivers have top-notch support for new kernels and X.org versions, whereas the binary driver does not - it often lags months behind. They also work out of the box, which simplifies things for the end user. The 2D performance is also better than their closed source driver (so I've heard - I don't use the closed driver).

Now that UVD and power management code have been released, the open source drivers are set to be a very compelling alternative to the binary (though admittedly we need to wait for kernel 3.11 for power management). The open source driver also supports more hardware: binary supports HD 5000 series and newer, whereas the open source drivers support pretty much everything from the Radeon X800.

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There's also RFC-level patches on the mesa-dev list today to add compute support for NVC0 (GeForce 400/500-series)... I'm sure there'll probably be a couple rounds of revisions, but progress is progress.

This level of compute support is jus barely sufficient to read some registers and store the result in a buffer. That's it. Nothing to see here.

However, reading some performance counters on NVIDIA cards is already possible on nve4 and support is being broaden thanks to Samuel's GSoC project. We are getting there!

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The 780 is based on the same chip as the Titan and costs considerably less. The chips will come down in price eventually. In 10 years time we may have Titans integrated onto our motherboards! I guess supporting the top-end chips also helps with the low-end chips from the same series (might be wrong here...).

In any case: bravo to the Nouveau developers!

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Sure, if you were to have a problem with the nvidia driver, you will be grateful that nouveau driver exist to have a functional system until you discover what is the problem with the nvidia driver.
I do not understand those who criticize this project. Nouveau does not interfere at all with the nvidia driver development, and allows get a driver with acceptable performance from a fresh GNU/Linux installation. If you want then, you can install the proprietary driver.
Having more than one option is good.